In this op-ed, writer Shamira Ibrahim explores Rihanna’s career and paradoxical roles as mogul and artist after her Super Bowl 2023 halftime show performance.
The year 2016 was a marked inflection point for Rihanna’s position in the public eye. After an unprecedented run from 2005-2012, shaping the trends of popular music at a breakneck pace — seven studio albums in as many years, with an endless caravan of hits drawing from disparate musical influences ranging from dancehall, rock, blues, EDM, R&B, and trap — the Bajan superstar returned to the mainstream with Anti. The album was a tour de force; a distinct stylistic and thematic evolution from her powerhouse pop singles that held a vice grip atop charts. The beats are stripped down and slick; her lyrics taut and unyielding from the first track, “Consideration (feat. SZA),” where the two artists croon in unison, let me cover your shit in glitter I can make it gold.
Later in the year, the MTV VMAs bestowed Rihanna with the Video Vanguard award. It was a moment feted with a series of medley performances throughout the night that have been celebrated by fans as some of her best showings, not due to any singular technical proficiency, but because of the perceived authenticity emanating from the stage as a dancehall riddim broke out. That has always been the razor’s edge that made Rihanna greater than the sum of her parts: she is an ethereal beauty with an impeccable ear for hits, and gutsy approach to visuals and personal fashion, but it is her sharp and irreverent approach to celebrity that endeared her to fans. It is a carefully crafted image. One that requires curated negotiations of her public-private persona, which she largely addresses in her music. While she has always been careful to steer clear of continuous political messaging, the connective tissue has always been about reclaiming the narrative from the press, embracing the chaos of navigating emotions in public life, and choosing self-empowerment, whether it be via raunch, fashion statements, or tattoo choices. That potpourri of elements is why when she growls, I’m a rockstar, fans and spectators alike have no choice but to agree.
Since Anti and the VMAs, however, much has changed for Robyn Fenty (and for SZA, for that matter, who has had a top-charting album with SOS in 2022). There has been the occasional feature over the last six years — DJ Khaled, Kendrick Lamar, and PARTYNEXTDOOR all successfully got her on a record — but she’s focused more of her efforts on building the Fenty empire: Fenty Beauty started in 2017, Savage X Fenty in 2018, the short-lived Fenty Maison luxury brand in 2019, and Fenty Skin in 2020. Her successful launch of Fenty Beauty — which she co-owns with French luxury retailer LVMH and is currently carried in Sephora and Ulta franchises — comprises the majority of her present wealth; the $1 billion valuation of the Savage brand is buoyed by a longstanding deal with Amazon to broadcast her productions showcasing her collections. Throughout, the Navy has eagerly anticipated a new, ninth studio album, loosely labeled R9, as she became an executive, found love, and built a family.
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Despite ascending to unprecedented wealth in the height of the “Eat the Rich” wave, Rihanna largely avoided scrutiny by promoting her charitable actions through the Clara Lionel Foundation, emphasizing advocacy for immigrants’ rights and domestic violence, and choosing key moments to make a political statement.
When she was asked to do the Super Bowl halftime show in 2019, her stance was firm. "I couldn’t dare do that. For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler," Rihanna told Vogue in October. "There’s things within that organization that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way." It was a pointed statement that not only came on the heels of ongoing scrutiny of the NFL’s continued mistreatment of Colin Kaepernick, but also came just two months after Roc Nation CEO Jay-Z had publicly announced a deal with the NFL, declaring, “I think we've moved past kneeling and I think it's time to go into actionable items." To the public’s eyes, Rihanna had taken a stand opposing her boss — furthering the branding that she was unbound by the rules of public convention, even those of class solidarity.
The frustrating reality, however, is that even someone with an ostensible Midas touch like Rihanna is felled by the albatross of capitalism. The intoxicating devil-may-care persona that has dominated her brand – the red hair, strolling down the streets with a glass (or bottle) of wine – is now at the helm of multiple companies. Her notable skills of mixing, matching, and synthesizing cross-genre elements into pop smashes is transferring into cross-product branding, attempting to fuse her brand with the public zeitgeist in ways that occasionally reveal a stunning misread of trending opinions. Inviting Johnny Depp to participate in the latest Savage x Fenty show was a striking example of this — to many fans, it represented an aberration of her hardline trend of refusing to collaborate with public figures who enabled intimate partner violence, having previously severed ties with Savage ambassadors for related missteps. The spectacle guaranteed eyes on the show more than the clothes, arguably making the calculus worth the backlash.
Similarly, Rihanna choosing to do the Super Bowl halftime show — an unpaid affair — lies at a distinct tension with the values she espoused only a few years ago. Rihanna herself has been mistreated by the organization — having her song taken off their promotional run as CBS and the NFL scrambled to address Ray Rice’s publicized assault of his now-wife — but it presented a novel opportunity for Rihanna the executive for a halftime show that was now an Apple and Roc Nation collaboration. While promotional interviews for the show have emphasized the performance as a celebration of Rihanna’s immense catalog, as she purrs in “Pour It Up”: money makes the world go ‘round. She may not have been generating direct income, but all of her brands configured a gameday section of their site in the weeks leading up to the performance. Savage not only had a limited 17-piece merch collection, but also put up the dancer’s looks for sale as a separate set after the halftime show. Mid-performance, Rihanna whipped out her Fenty Invisimatte blotting powder to set her Fenty face in transition.
Rihanna has existed as more than an entertainer for quite some time. The messaging is laid bare in the construction of her halftime performance – Rihanna suspended in air, encircled by her planet of platforms with the Arizona night sky as her backdrop. She is a bright red sun, her dancers relentlessly exploding around her in defined arcs like a bright constellation of stars as she cascades through a glimpse of the chart-toppers that made her inescapable. She is a solar system all her own; a big bang; a force of nature. Her mesmerizing visage is already a meme – brief, tight shots of her gazing directly into the camera, a mischievous twinkle behind her eyes as she strolls down the catwalk. For a few flashes, her gravitas supersedes the cognitive dissonance of it all – her catalog standing on its own, paired with her impeccable style, charisma and a clear attention to vocal control – and brief set pieces of her enshrouded by her dancers as Carlos Santana’s guitar solo blares in the background look like an exquisite fresco painting in the making.
Rihanna’s star shines so bright that it temporarily blinds us to the reality: that she is a profit-seeking enterprise, accountable to too many parties to truly hold firm to her longstanding penchant for disruption. Perhaps Rihanna the artist would have returned to her fans in a more avant-garde manner, but Rihanna the salesperson, Rihanna the billionaire, cannot turn down the world’s biggest marketing platform, where she can advertise for free instead of shelling out millions for cherished 30-second slots. It doesn’t make the show more or less entertaining, but it makes the pretense of Rihanna somehow being a magical exception amongst the wealthy — where principles in solidarity with other marginalized people have negotiable price points — a bigger, and more necessary, pill to swallow.
